In Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 spoken-word song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” serves as both a secret password and background noise. The members of the defunct resistance group the French 75 use its lyrics as a call-and-response sign and countersign: If you know what comes after “Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction,” you must be one of the good guys. But when former revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who has resurfaced after 15 years in hiding, tries to reach out to his old comrades, Scott-Heron’s song is the music he hears when they put him on hold. What was once an anthem about opposing the numbing effects of popular culture has been consumed by it, a golden oldie you might absently nod your head to in the aisles of a chain drugstore.
It’s not surprising that so many of the movies that hit hardest in 2025 were about the struggle against authoritarianism. That’s true not just of the movies that make up an unbreakable tie for first on my Top 10 list—One Battle, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, and Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part 1—Last Air in Moscow—but of others slightly further down, like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Ari Aster’s Eddington, even Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee. With the exception of Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead, conceived in November and shot in March, none of these movies was made knowing the climate in which it would land, a country in which entire government agencies were gutted in a matter of weeks and masked agents swiped people off the streets. But they understood in advance that such a world was possible—that it could, and might well, happen here. It’s endearing to watch the beleaguered Russian journalists in Loktev’s expansive documentary swap Harry Potter references as Vladimir Putin’s government rips away what few freedoms they still have. But the realization that they’re just like us! comes with a darker flip side: We are no different from them.
For years, some of the movies most vital to understanding the state of the U.S. have come from other countries. Watch Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, about the tightening noose of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, or Petra Costa’s documentaries The Edge of Democracy and Apocalypse in the Tropics, about the country’s recent surge of Christian nationalism, and it’s easier to spot the patterns that have taken root here, the tendency to deny and diminish, to write off the loss of this or that right as a temporary inconvenience as long as your life remains relatively unchanged. As Loktev told me, even on the night that Putin started bombing Ukraine, people in Moscow were still going on Tinder dates. “You feel like you’re going crazy,” she said in August. “Like, Is this really happening? There’s still matcha lattes everywhere.”
Loktev’s heroes, many of whom work for the independent network TV Rain, keep up the good fight even as the walls close in. But the movie ends with them fleeing for safety, and although the upcoming Part 2, which will cover their lives in exile, may offer some slight rays of hope, we know that this story doesn’t end well, at least for now. Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident follows an Iranian political prisoner’s attempt to settle the score with his former torturer, whom he discovers by chance, kidnaps, and begins to bury alive. But the man’s screamed denials sow a seed of doubt, and though he seeks out some of the torturer’s other victims to confirm his initial identification, no one is quite sure enough. With no state apparatus to relieve their conscience, they’re stuck with those doubts and have to choose between living with fear or with guilt. Either way, they’ll never be free again.
What strikes me is that these movies are not just about resistance but about failure—and that only makes them more important to a moment when there’s a lot more bad ahead than good. Sinners’ Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) goes out in a blaze of glory, mowing down a bunch of Mississippi Klansmen, but it’s his twin brother Stack who survives into the second half of the century, accepting an undead existence over a valiant death. Eddington’s Sheriff Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) knocks off his political rivals and achieves the small-town mayorship he so desperately craves, but at the price of becoming a part of the conspiracy he thought he was unraveling. For all the movie’s fevered imaginings, it can’t envision a way out.
These movies aren’t hopeless, exactly, but they testify to the idea that the struggle, whether it be against encroaching fascism, the temptations of the flesh, or the dark side of human nature, is not a battle to be won but a life to be lived. Bob Ferguson and his French 75 comrades want fast, decisive change, even if they have to blow up a few buildings to get it, but by 40, they’re fugitives and burnouts, unable to pass on to the next generation anything more than an overarching sense that the world is out to get them. Meanwhile, Bob’s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), is being mentored by her judo instructor, Sergio (Benicio del Toro), whose underground network for sheltering migrants is so low profile it doesn’t even have a name.
David Osit’s documentary Predators models another kind of lifelong defiance, excavating personal trauma by examining the legacy of To Catch a Predator. It’s a bold subject to begin with, given that any attempt to consider the show’s targets as human beings risks the charge of coddling the worst people alive—a phenomenon that TCAP, as its fans call it, not only embodies but exploits, considering that there’s no ethical line it can’t justify crossing in the name of dispensing justice. (Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project takes on a similar, if much more slippery, project, deconstructing the language of true-crime documentaries by rebuilding an unrealized film as a feature-length metacritique.) But Predators takes it further, questioning whether the on-air humiliation that not only fueled the show’s success but inspired a legion of rogue copycats acts as a meaningful deterrent for potential offenders or provides any sense of healing for their victims. In a climate where the government is pushing harsh penalties for minor offenses while shielding the associates of a child sex trafficker, Osit’s movie stands in opposition to both.
Like The Brutalist but with catchier tunes, Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee is about the building of America—not as a place made of concrete and steel, but one inhabited by religious extremists who found space to take their beliefs as far as they would go. And Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love explores how women’s most intense beliefs—in this case postpartum psychosis exacerbated by the protagonist’s isolation and her inattentive husband—are often stigmatized and shunned, left to smolder in private until they burst out in flame. It’s the converse of the men of Mountainhead, whose moneyed tech bros have built themselves a world in which their every half-assed idea is a stroke of visionary genius and anyone who might disagree has long since been removed from their orbit. The movie was made for HBO and never got a theatrical release, but that’s a problem more for movie theaters than for film critics, who ought to recognize great work no matter which distribution channel it manages to escape through. The revolution might not be televised, but it may end up on streaming.
Sam Adams’ Top 10 Movies of 2025
It Was Just an Accident
My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow
One Battle After Another
Predators
Die My Love
Mountainhead
Sinners
The Testament of Ann Lee
Eddington
Zodiac Killer Project